The Gods Return (23 page)

Ilna smiled faintly. "I prefer brick also," she said. "Not that that's anyone else's business."

Brincisa waited for a heartbeat, then chuckled. "Yes, mistress," she said. "We can help one another. My workroom is on the top level, so go on there if you will."

Ilna counted the floors absently with quick knots in her fabric, one and one and one and finally one more; the fingers of one hand, four. Not only was Brincisa's house made of different material from the rest of Gaur, it was taller. The molded plaques set into the brickwork over windows were too ornate for Ilna's taste, but she had to admit that they
were
tasteful.

Each floor had a central hall with doors set around it. There was only one door on the uppermost hallway, closed like the others. Ilna stopped beside it and waited for the others to join her. Brincisa touched the panel; an unseen latch clicked and the door swung open.

"Enter, mistress," she said. "And you may enter as well, Master Ingens; but remember your place."

The secretary nodded. His face was tight, but he successfully hid whichever emotions were affecting him.

Save for the hall and staircase, the upper floor was a single high room lighted through a ceiling covered with slats of mica; it cast a faintly bluish shimmer over everything. The walls were frescoed with a base color of fresh cream. Roundels of green and gold framed the doorway and alcoves—there were no windows—and sea creatures swam in the upper registers.

Ilna stopped just inside the door when she felt sand scrunch under the soles of her bare feet. She looked down. What she'd thought was a gray pavement was instead a thin layer of ground pumice, brushed over tightly fitting slabs of pale marble. She looked at Brincisa.

"For my art, mistress," Brincisa said. "So that the incantations don't leave residues to interfere with later work. Don't worry—the grit won't follow you out of the room."

Ilna sniffed. "You're wrong that they don't leave traces," she said. "But it's no matter to me."

Ingens followed the women inside; the door closed behind him, though it hadn't been touched by anything Ilna saw. The secretary clasped his hands before him; he turned his head slowly to look around, but his body was as stiff and straight as if he'd been tied to a stake.

Brincisa's earlier spells
did
leave signs despite the care with which the sand had been raked, but the fact Ilna could see a pattern remaining didn't mean it was of significance even to the powers on which the universe turned. She'd really been slapping back at Brincisa for her assumption that Ilna was afraid to get her feet dirty. Brincisa obviously insulated herself from the realities of life even in this considerable town; she couldn't possibly imagine the muck of a farming hamlet.

Which raised another question . . . .

"Mistress?" Ilna said. "You came here from another place, did you not?"

"I will not discuss the place we came from!" Brincisa said. She was noticeably angry, but Ilna thought she also heard fear. "That has nothing to do with anyone but me and Hutton, and now with me alone!"

"Yes," said Ilna, silently pleased to have gotten through the other woman's reserve. "But the reason you came here concerns me, since I'm here as well. And—"

She smiled faintly to keep the next words from being a direct accusation.

"—I came here in a way that concerns me a great deal."

Brincisa made a sour face and nodded in apology. "Yes, of course," she said. "As I'm sure you've guessed, Ortran is a nexus of great power now, but the island of fisherman that existed in your former universe was just the reverse. It repelled the use of the arts. At the Change that, that
vacuum
so to speak, drew Gaur and its immediate surroundings into this present."

Ilna thought over what she'd just been told. She hadn't noticed any difficulty in seeing off the troublesome fishermen, but she hadn't knotted a very complicated pattern either. Regardless, Brincisa had answered her question in a direct, perfectly believable fashion.

"All right," she said. "What is it that you want from me?"

For the first time since she'd entered the room, Ilna took the time to look at its furnishings. A stuffed sea wolf hung from the ceiling, a young female no longer than an outstretched arm. Some of the beasts stretched as much as three double-paces from jaws filled with conical teeth to the tip of the flat, oar-like tail.

Not far from the lizard was a series of silver rings around a common center, each with a gold bead somewhere on the circle. Ilna must've frowned in question, for Brincisa said, "An orrery. You can adjust it to show the relative positions of all the bodies in the firmament."

Ilna didn't know what "the firmament" was, let alone what "the bodies" were. She supposed it didn't matter.

Brick pillars projecting into the room to support the roof. On the lower floors the alcoves were probably pierced for windows, but in this workroom the walls were solid; the spaces were filled with bookshelves and racks for scrolls.

On one end of the long room was an earthenware sarcophagus molded in the shape of a plump woman who smiled in painted idiocy. On the other was a skeleton upright in a wooden cabinet—Ilna couldn't tell how it was fastened; it seemed to be standing normally—and a soapstone tub holding a corpse whose flesh lay brown and waxy over the bones.

The items were more impressive examples of the trappings of the charlatans who came through the borough periodically, their paraphernalia carried on the backs of wasted mules. Brincisa, whatever else she might be, was not a charlatan.

"My husband Hutton and I came to Gaur seventeen years ago," Brincisa said. "The town was very suitable for our researches, as you might expect. There's a peculiarity in the laws of the community, however, which has created a difficulty for me."

As she spoke, she toyed with a silver athame. The reflections on the flats of its blade didn't seem to show the room in which Ilna stood. "As I told you, my husband died three days ago."

Ilna nodded curtly. She expected there would be a point, and she'd learned that they wouldn't reach that point any more quickly if she said, "Why do you imagine I care about the death of someone I'd never met?" or even some more polite form of words to the same effect.

"In expectation of his death, Hutton placed his most valuable tool of art in a casket which he bound to his breast with a single hair," Brincisa said. "He then walked out of the house and died in front of the municipal assembly building. Even I couldn't prevent him from being buried with his casket."

She flung the athame at the stone floor. It rang musically away, its point bent. Ingens whimpered faintly.

"That was his," Brincisa said mildly.

She continued to smile, but the fury in her eyes was obvious to anyone. "My fellow townspeople fear me, as they should," she said. "But they are more afraid of violating their burial ordinances . . . and in that too they are wise. Nothing I could do or say would change their minds."

Ingens opened his mouth, then closed it again with a shocked expression. Ilna glanced at him, looked at Brincisa, and said, "Master Ingens, did you have a comment?"

Ingens licked his dry lips. His eyes shuttled quickly between the two women. He didn't speak.

"Master Ingens," Ilna snapped, "your place is whatever I say it is! If you have something to say, say it!"

She glared at Brincisa. Brincisa bowed politely.

"If Master Hutton knew he was going to die," Ingens said in a perfectly normal voice, "why did he choose to do it in a public place, Mistress Brincisa?"

"To spite me, of course," Brincisa said with an undertone of fury. "All those who die in Gaur are immediately interred in the clothes they die in, in the cave on Blue Hill. That's the bluff that you may have noticed at the head of High Street."

"Immediately?" Ilna said.

Brincisa shrugged. "Within four hours," she said. "Though I doubt that I could have untied the casket's bindings regardless of how much time I had."

Her gaze focused on Ilna. "
You
can untie them, mistress," she said. "And in exchange, I'll see to it that you and your companion—"

She nodded to Ingens.

"—reach your intended destination more quickly than you would've done had your vessel not been damaged in an earthquake."

"You want me to rob a grave for you," Ilna said.

Brincisa shrugged. "Yes," she said. "I'll help—the entrance to the cave is always guarded, but I'll put the whole town to sleep so that you aren't inconvenienced. But you'll go into the cave alone to remove the casket. After all—"

She smiled coldly.

"—you never met the man, so why should you care about him now that he's dead? I assure you, mistress, you would
not
have liked him in life."

Ingens gestured with one finger to call silent attention to himself. Ilna nodded to him.

"I'm sure Mistress Ilna can untie this hair," the secretary said, "but I'm perfectly willing to go into this tomb and cut the casket free without worrying about the knot. Wouldn't that be simpler?"

"Cutting this particular hair would not be simple, no, Master Ingens," Brincisa said with amusement. "Not though you used a sword of diamond. Untying the knot will not be simple either, but I think Mistress Ilna will find it possible."

Ilna shrugged. "It seems straightforward enough," she said. She felt her lips curl up in a kind of smile. "If it's a bit of a test, well, I don't mind a test."

"Then we'll go to the tomb tonight," Brincisa said with satisfaction. "For now, I had dinner prepared against your arrival. You'll have plenty of time to eat and prepare."

Ilna thought, but she said only, "Yes, I could use something to eat."

It wasn't a surprise that Brincisa had known to prepare for Ilna's arrival; but as the wizard had said, she and Ingens would reach Caraman more quickly this way. Ilna supposed it didn't matter.

* * *

Before the Change, the Kolla River had flowed from Haft into the Inner Sea no more than thirty miles south of Barca's Hamlet, where Garric had lived for his first eighteen years. This was the first time he'd seen the Kolla, now a tributary of the North River. In the normal course of Garric's life as an innkeeper, he might never have gone thirty miles from Barca's Hamlet in any direction.

A similar thought must have occurred to Reise, standing beside him on the bank as they watched boatmen poling the grain barges downriver to the army. He gave Garric a twisted smile and said, "Everything has changed."

Reise plucked the sleeve of his silken inner tunic. "I've changed. But nothing has changed more than you have."

He cleared his throat; an ordinary man, not particularly impressive even now that he'd lost the stoop with which he'd stood all the years Garric was growing up. He said, "I hope it isn't presumptuous of me to say this, but I'm very proud of you, son."

Garric put his arm around his father's shoulders, hugged him quickly, and stepped aside again. "I don't know how I came to be . . . ," Garric said. "To be what I am now. But your teaching is the reason I've been able to handle it as well as I have."

"I didn't teach you how to be king, Garric," Reise said, his smile even more lopsided than before. He was now Lord Reise, advisor to the Vicar of Haft—a hereditary nobleman whose only sign of ability lay in his willingness to do what his humbly born advisor said.

"
And I certainly didn't teach you how to be a
good
king
," said the ghost of King Carus with a familiar chuckle. "
Though I suppose you could have used me as a bad example
."

"Let's say that I have a number of advisors," Garric said. "One of the things I got from my father was the ability to tell good advice from bad."

A herd of sheep was being driven eastward along the opposite bank of the river. Garric estimated the size with quick professionalism, flashing tens with his fingers and counting them out loud: "Yain, tain, eddero . . . ."

He'd reached, " . . . eddero-dix, peddero-dix," before he completed the count: seven score sheep, and from two separate flocks. There were two rams, and the boys badgering the animals—rations on the hoof for the army—had their work cut out because of it.

Garric grimaced. "Duzi!" he said. "They'd have done better to leave one of the rams back in its district—or butcher it there, either one. If they had to combine the two herds to drive them, which I don't see that they did."

"I'll make inquiries, your highness," said Reise, jotting a memorandum to himself on a four-leaf notebook of waxed birchwood.

The company of Blood Eagles who'd escorted Garric were divided into sections standing ten double-paces to east and west. Troopers of the cavalry squadron that had swept ahead were watering from the river by troop. Tenoctris sat on a rock nearby. She seemed to be observing the sky, though Garric found the high, streaky clouds unremarkable.

Lord Reise's camp was a village on a rise a quarter mile back from the river. The knoll had been wooded before the accompanying regiment had stockaded the encampment.

Reise followed Garric's glance and said, "I brought a senior clerk from each department and from the twenty borough offices. I wanted to be ready to provide whatever information you need."

"Borough offices?" Garric said. He smiled and shook his head in amazement. "I didn't know there were borough offices on Haft."